A Long Post In A Long Heat Wave

What would we do without AC???  Those of us in Massachusetts  have been in a week-long heat wave.  We may break a record today.  At 10 AM the temp is already 100 degrees !!!

It hasn't mattered all that much because I've been hard at work in my sewing room getting ready for the Lowell Quilt Festival.  I just mailed off my 3 Cohesive Pieces to the NEQF for the SAQA exhibit and am about to deliver another 3 to the BMQG.

I did venture out on Wednesday, though, to meet fellow BMQG member, Gwen Marceline,  at Quilter's Way in Acton a great quilt shop with very friendly staff and a great selection of quilting fabrics for the modern quilter!  I used one of their machines while Gwen taught me how to "face" a quilt, for which I'll be forever grateful!  We followed thesillyboodilly super-duper-easy-way-to-face a quilt  tutorial, which I couldn't quite follow myself.  Now that Gwen walked me through it holding my hand step-by-step, I can't imagine why I couldn't follow it which shows to go you how seriously direction challenged I am!   I love these facings and I think they're quite appropriate for art quilts.  And they so fit the modern quilt aesthetic even on large quilts.

The guidelines for the Boston Modern Quilt Guild's LQF Mini Quilt Challenge are that they must be no larger than 2 feet in either direction  and this color palette.  So here  are my two mini-quilt entrees and they are the two that I faced. 

I began "Run Janny Run" as the first for a series on the fleeting moments of my memories.  As a child I was a runner who used to run in a citywide road race on the fourth of July and I won many of these races and was quite proud of it. I would probably have been diagnosed as hyperactive because I never stopped moving, therefore graduating to bikes as a form of constant movement as well as competitions and "shows" that us kids put on in our little neighborhood doing tricks on bikes. We dressed up our bikes all spiffy with baseball cards hitched to the spokes of the wheel with clothespins and with streamers flowing from the handgrips.

We also played many ball games from day to night so the many round shapes reflect this.   I did have a bike that was green but it had to be red for this piece!  Those largish houndstooth checks also reminded me of another summer love of mine, when I went to a summer program of doing crafts every Saturday where I made key chains for my relatives out of gimp. The bold black diamond shapes on white reminded me of summer carnivals and racing flags.  I also had a fascination with flowers and ladybugs.  Again I had to run upstairs to fetch another carving to print these little suckers and hand embroider them.  And we were all especially enamored with blowing dandelion flowers as they went to seed!

"Run Janny Run"

 Soon after I started "Run Janny Run" "Fugitive Memories" began to insist itself into existence.  I didn't even know what was coming of it but I had to put the first one I was working on aside to do this next one because it simply pushed its way into life as if the various elements jumped out of my drawers onto my table and practically arranged themselves.  My shibori dyed fabric squares are mixed with commercial fabrics.  Again, the dandelion motif wanted to share in both quilts!  And some of my tiny bird carvings came to life on some fabric that I painted blue and white as I was working on painting the background for the girl runner. Some pieces of decorator fabric that were recycled to me from a freecycler were just the right hand to lend some soft and lush texture to the right of the birds in flight. Those bottom silks came from the same source - I love to reuse and recycle in my art whenever I can.  The tree photos I took at the top of the Lake Quanapowett and played with color in Photoshop until they practically caught fire!  I can't tell you any more than this as I did not plan this at all and it chose what it wanted to be rather than the other way around, as it often goes with us artists.

"Fugitive Memories"

The sleeves are also a new design for me.  It's a "D" shaped sleeve and I followed another online tutorial for this:  tallgrassprairiestudio./hang-your-quilt-hanging-sleeve-tutorial.html.  I like it more than my usual one and I think it'll hang better. 

Back Of  "Fugitive Memories" showing the facing and the sleeve on top.  The facing
 does not show at all on the front of the quilt.

Back of "Run Janny Run"

Let Them Be Wild

"Let Them Be Wild" was named after a verse in the poem Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

This quilt was born as a political statement,  a desire to inspire others to contemplate and honor

 the wet and the wild, to preserve our oceans and the life within them.

My Own Coffee Obsession

It seems to be a phenom for me to get back into the flow, after some hiatus, with a rush of different pursuits.  But this time, I've at least stayed, more or less, with the same subject in a few different mediums, instigated by Quilting Arts most recent Reader Challenge, "Coffee or Tea?"in the October/November Issue.

So first I set up a still life and took a photo of it:

Then I did a watercolor:

 

Next, I made an art quilt using this image:

 

 

And now, I'm working on carving a linoleum block:

 





 

And I've started some small projects that I'll elaborate on in the next post.  And I'll leave you with an appropriate quote:

"The seed of your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections (or mistakes, if you’re feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides -- valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgemental guides -- to matters you need to reconsider or develop further.”  David Bayles and Ted Orland



 

 

Maybe I'm a M 'Kmaq...

This print is in a page of another book. The theme was "Native American and Canadian Cultures." As a kid, I remember my grandmother, who was originally from Nova Scotia, telling me that we were of Native Canadian heritage.  I 'm pretty sure she said her grandmother lived on a reservation and she married a Scot.  We have no documentation of this.  The records seem to end with my grandmother's mother.  Nevertheless, I grew up believing and identifying with Native Americans and Canadians, along with the French Canadian ancestors that we do know about.

So, I chose to explore the Mi'Kmac culture for this project because it's most likely that we emanate from this tribe, whose tribal lands stretched from Nova Scotia and PEI to New Brunswick and southward into northern Maine.  It' a carving of an authentic Mi' Kmaq women's shirt.

Bridging The Mixed Media

For the past year I've been hosting an artist book exchange.  Actually, it's a round robin and there have been 2 of them. One is finished - a paper arts exchange, called Book Arts Round Robin (BARR); the  current one is a fiber art book, called Book Arts Round Robin 2 (BARR 2).

This is the one I thought I'd begin to share a little with you because it bridges the mediums of carving and printmaking with fiber art.

This is the cover page for my own book.  Each person will make 2 pages for my book, the theme is "Pattern and Design." It is being sent off to 9 other artists and when each of them is finished adding to it, it will return to me and I will then bind all of the pages into a book.  Of course, all 9 of us are doing this and so we will each end up with one book, our own, with 18 pages of fiber art executed according to the parameters that we set out for our own theme and size, to bind together for their own unique artist book!

 In this first page, you can see that the edges of the pages are loose so that I can bind them into a book when they are all gathered together at the end of the round robin.

First, I took some muslin and painted on the blue, brown and black loose stripes with fabric paints, heat set that and cut it into the sizes and shapes I needed.  I don't plan these steps in advance.  I do it as I go along.  Of course, I sometimes screw it up royally and rip out scads of stuff, but that's what happens in my little domain!

Then I took another piece of painted muslin and transferred a clip art tree design onto it using Leslie Riley's TAP (Transfer Artist Paper).  I made a pocket out of that and sewed it on to the bottom half of the page.

For the tree branches I sewed up some fabric scraps as you would do to make a binding and I wrapped that around and around and quickly stitched it as I held onto one end by my teeth. I shoved the other end and dropped it  under the presser foot of my machine  freeing up my other hand to hand to guide it through the stitching process.  Then I just sewed it by hand onto the upper half of the page and attached a print of my crow carving on muslin and covered that with a bit of organza, so it's a little shimmery and exciting ( of course some of these things just don't read as well on the computer as they do close up and in person. For the finishing touch I added hand embroidery and beads.

To continue on with the subject of trees, I dived into my first effort at gelatin printing on fabric.  I made leaf shapes out of tag board and rolled some fabric ink over them - I had a blast doing this!  I love gel printing! Again, I added more twisted up fabric for seam binding, hand embroidery and beads

Then I made a card stock tag to go into the pocket with an artist statement. It was so much fun to get started and mail it off to wait for the first arrival of someone else's pages!